The Tripping President

"There was no credible intelligence that North Koreans actually had a facility capable of making uranium based bombs.

"Yet, conservative hardliners bent on ending an 'Agreed Framework' nuclear deal with North Korea forged under president Bill Clinton's administration seized on the issue to force a confrontation, the book said.

"It added that then US assistant secretary of state James Kelly was given instructions not to negotiate on his October 2002 trip to Pyongyang but simply tell the North Koreans they had to abandon their uranium program before any progress was possible.

"He was also ordered not to observe normal diplomatic courtesies such as holding a reciprocal banquet for his North Korean hosts or making a toast at a meal they hosted for him upon his arrival."

Washington Post diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler reviews the book, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis.

Kessler writes: "When North Korea admitted in June that it had produced enough plutonium for a half-dozen nuclear bombs, National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley suggested that the admission resulted from steady U.S. diplomatic pressure since the beginning of the Bush administration nearly eight years ago. Meltdown, a tour de force of reporting by former CNN Beijing correspondent Mike Chinoy, demonstrates that the White House version of events is as misleading as the propaganda crafted in Pyongyang.

"Chinoy shows that American policy toward North Korea often became incoherent and self-defeating as administration insiders fought desperately to gain the upper hand in internal debates. The North Koreans took advantage of this disarray to build their stockpile of plutonium, believed to total 37 or 38 kilograms, and even to test a nuclear device underground.

"History may not judge kindly the Bush administration's ill-fated invasion of Iraq, but in Chinoy's telling, historians may be even more critical of the administration's handling of North Korea."

Legacy Watch

Jane Mayer writes in the New York Review of Books: "Seven years after al-Qaeda's attacks on America, as the Bush administration slips into history, it is clear that what began on September 11, 2001, as a battle for America's security became, and continues to be, a battle for the country's soul.

"In looking back, one of the most remarkable features of this struggle is that almost from the start, and at almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world. . . .

"Instead of heeding this well-intentioned dissent, however, the Bush administration invoked the fear flowing from the attacks on September 11 to institute a policy of deliberate cruelty that would have been unthinkable on September 10. . . .

"When warned that these policies were unlawful and counterproductive, they ignored the experts and made decisions outside of ordinary bureaucratic channels, and often outside of the public's view. . . . Far from tempering these policies over time, they marginalized and penalized those who challenged their idées fixes."